Thursday, December 7, 2006

2014-06 Update: Hi, if you are reading this page, please understand that it is out of date. I can’t bring myself to edit or remove it, so I have added a new About page at About Chris Spackman. After you finish this page, feel free to head over to the new page and see what I have been upto since coming back to the States in late 2008.

Osugi Sakae (大杉 栄 Ōsugi Sakae, January 17, 1885–September 16, 1923) was a radical individualist and anarchist. He published numerous anarchist periodicals, helped translate various western anarchist essays into Japanese for the first time, and created Japan’s first Esperanto school in 1906. He, Noe Itō, and his nephew were murdered in what became known as the Amakasu Incident.

I am not Ōsugi Sakae. My name is Chris Spackman and I studied Ōsugi Sakae’s life and writings in school before coming to Japan. This is my personal website. (My history-related web stuff is at www.openhistory.org.)

I live in Kanazawa, Japan, a wonderful city of about half a million souls on the Japan Sea side of Honshu. My day job is “English Education Coordinator” for the Kanazawa City Board of Education. Basically, that means that my coworkers and I help run the English program for the 58 municipal elementary schools in Kanazawa.

I started using Linux in 1999 and was using it full time (not dual booting) by mid-2000. Haven’t looked back since. Currently I run Gentoo with KDE at home on a home built AMD 64 box. I also have Fluxbox installed as a backup window manager and also have Gnome installed for my wife to use. Unfortunately, I am forced to use MS Windows XP at work.

Even before I started using Linux, though, I was working on a web site related to Japanese history. Originally it was published under an opencontent license – this was before the GNU FDL, Creative Commons, or Wikipedia even existed! Now I maintain OpenHistory and the encyclopedia and introduction to Japanese history text are published under the FDL.